A third-generation New Yorker, Miss Rosen has gone tri-boro. She represents the Bronx, Manhattan, and Brooklyn, where she lives and works as an author, journalist, photo editor, curator, publicist, and branding strategist. Everything is Art. Photography. Stories. Poetry. Scene. Drama. Romance. Passion. Intrigue. Glamour. Everything is books. They offer a romance no other medium can touch.
In February 2013, Miss Rosen published her first novel, The Kingdom of Eternal Night, on a blog of the same name. Serialized into 39 parts, each chapter of the novel is illustrated by a photograph as it begins; artists featured include Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Erwin Blumenfeld, Eric Johnson, Daido Moriyama, Nadar, Ruby Ray, and Francis Wolff.
Miss Rosen wrote about photography for the award-winning newsletter Le Journal de la Photographie from 2010-2013. She has profiled Albert Watson for Martha Graham, Mario Testino for El Museo, Egyptian revolutionary Aliaa Magda Elmahdy, Trolley Books publisher Gigi Giannuzzi, and insurrectionist, smuggler, and photographer Nat Finkelstein. She has previously contributed stories to Code (Netherlands), L’Uomo Vogue, Staf (Spain), Swindle, Telegraph (UK), and Whitewall magazines.
From 2000¬–2009, Miss Rosen was the Senior Vice President of Marketing & Publicity for powerHouse Books, a photography and illustrated book publisher based in Brooklyn. In 2005 she launched Miss Rosen Editions, her own imprint focusing on contemporary urban culture. She published 15 art, photography, memoir, and fiction titles with authors including Boogie, Martha Cooper, and Charlie Ahearn. Miss Rosen also launched powerHouse magazine, a twice-yearly publication organized around a single theme, equal parts cultural investigation, exhibition catalogue, and product brochure.
As Vice President of Marketing & Publicity, Miss Rosen conceptualized and executed campaigns for some 45 books annually, and produced hundreds of book events including cocktail parties, exhibitions, musical performances, readings, lectures, and slide shows. Her career highlights include the Vandal Squad panel discussion at the powerHouse Arena; “We B*Girlz: A 25th Anniversary Breakin’ Event at Lincoln Center Out of Doors”; the graffiti episode of NBC’s “The Apprentice”; and the Hilhaven Lodge party at Robert Evans’ Beverly Hills estate.
Miss Rosen has lectured at Columbia University, the International Center of Photography, and the School of Visual Arts, all in New York. She has been featured in publications including aRUDE, Eyemazing, Juxtapoz, Paper Magazine’s 9th Annual “Beautiful People” Issue, Photo District News, Spread ArtCulture, and Style Monte Carlo.

“In Soviet days, photography was regarded as subversive. It posed a potential danger, capturing images whose content and impact could not be fully monitored,” Thomas Köhler writes in his essay, “In the Streets”, which introduces Boris Mikhailov’s new monograph, Time Is Out of Joint (Distanz Verlag).

Köhler informs us, “Boris Mikhailov trained as an engineer. In the mid-1960s, he suggested to his superiors that it might be nice to make a short film about the factory where he worked. This short film was Mikhailov’s entry into artistic production. He took photos in a purely private context, too, and according to Mikhailov it was these nudes that drew suspicion when the KGB discovered them in the company laboratory. Photographs of this ilk—even though the subject was his own wife—were seen as pornographic and an expression of Western decadence. Mikhailov felt the force of state control and censorship first-hand: he lost his job and was thereupon confronted with an existential problem. Henceforth he worked entirely as a photographer, earning a living for many years thanks to a side job as an assistant photographic technician.”

It is here in Time is Out of Joint that we see what came of this, of the life that began through the camera lens, of a way of seeing and a way of looking inside the former Soviet Union and after its fall, in a world inhabited by people whose life stories are but a mystery, whose visages belie the hardship of life and death, of a world that is in equal parts as grim and determined as it is aching with loss.

Time is Out of Joint includes a number of different series that bring together works of Mikhailov organized thematically. Among the series is “Case History”, which was created during the period of 1997­–1999. As the book notes, “After spending a year in Berlin on a DAAD bursary, Mikhailov returned to Kharkov to find it—on the surface—cleaner, newer, and increasingly like a European city. And yet the social divide was widening as fast as this outer rehabilitation progressed. On the one hand, a middle class was beginning to emerge. On the other more and more people had lost all they had” their jobs, their homes, their status, and the respect of their fellow-citizens. They were known as ‘bomzhes:’ homeless people with no entitlement to social benefits.

“By documenting their conditions and their naked bodies, Boris Mikhailov hope to draw hard-hitting attention to the precarious plight of the poor in his country. At the same time, this piece is designed to capture a piece of Ukrainian history. After so many decades when dark chapters of the past were systematically eradicated or excluded from record by censors, Case History is intended to fill a gap.” This last sentence could speak well for the entire oeuvre of Mikhailov, whose works are unfettered by social or cultural conditioning, showing us the universe through the heart and mind of a single man whose life’s work inspires us to question our assumptions about art and life in one fell swoop.

“The truth never lies in a single picture, but in the relationship between several,” Mikhailov said in conversation. We are free to consider his work within the series, and the series to each other, to consider the evolution of his eye as it traveled the world. We see that there is both comedy and tragedy in the world, and many spaces in between for commentary on the human condition. We witness that which is different, and that which is similar, situating ourselves in relation to the image while also feeling the energy it conveys. This is a tribute to Mikhailov’s mind; his approach is to his subject is as complex as the inner workings of his brain, and we see this in how he treats his series, be it from a conceptual or documentary approach. It is from this array of perspectives that a desire to grasp the meaning and depth of his work is born.

But can we ever understand or ever truly know? Perhaps it is the cumulative effect of Mikhailov’s works that allow us to consider the experience of a shifting tableau, that which exists outside of us and inside of us at the same time, in all times, the ever-present constant of change.

Miss RosenAi Weiwei: New York 1983–1993

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Dez 2013

Ai Weiwei

From 1983 to 1993, artist, architect, and activist Ai Weiwei lived in New York City. Ai, who was 26 years old when he arrived, only returned to China a decade later when he received word that his father, Ai Qing, a writer of extraordinary renown, lay dying. This extended stay in the United States would go on to shape his vision and his work as he entered the avant-garde scene head on. Not yet famous, Ai lived in a tiny apartment in the East Village, where he befriended the likes of Allen Ginsberg, familiarized himself with the work of Joseph Beuys, and allowed himself to be influenced by Andy Warhol. During his decade in New York, Ai took more than 10,000 photographs. From this archive, he personally curated a collection of more than 220 for exhibition at the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Germany,… Read more »

Miss RosenWilliam Claxton: Jazz Life

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Dez 2013

“Early in 1959 I received a telephone call from Germany. The person introduced himself as Joachim-Ernst Berendt, a musciologist living in Baden-Baden. In very good English, he explained that he was coming to America to do a study of ‘America’s great art—jazz.’ He went on to say that he needed a photographer to work with him—a photographer who liked and understood jazz. He had seen a great deal of my work published in European magazines and on record covers and thought that I would be the perfect choice to work with him—‘because your pictures have soul,’” William Claxton recounts in the foreword to Jazz Life: A Journey for Jazz Across America in 1960 (Taschen), a 600-page compendium that takes us on a fantastic voyage through one of the country’s most indelible and evocative arts… Read more »

Miss RosenRuby Ray: From the Edge of the World

02

Dez 2013

Ruby Ray: Darby Crash, Backstage Cutup, 1978

And so it had finally come, From the Edge of the World by Ruby Ray (Superior Viaduct), because this is where it is. This, yes, California Punk. 1977, 78, 79, right on through 81. Brave New World like Aldous Huxley said—but out in San Francisco, the Man of Letters was William S. Burroughs. Ruby Ray was with him, right on the edge. She caught him with a gun through her camera lens. She captured so many of these moths to the flame, burning with a passion and desire that true punk could claim: Darby Crash. Hellinn Killer and Sid Vicious. Poison Ivy. Kids on stage. Kids off stage. All this raw gorgeous energy. Black and white. Color shots. A sweet little photo album, remembrance of things past like Proust said.

And me, I am quoting novelists I’ve never read, and never will, because words, they do go on…but photographs scream and shout then whisper sweet nothings without ever saying a word. They embed themselves in memory as though we there and it is happening to us, like we are hanging with John Maxwell and Roky Erickson at Mabuhay Gardens, and we are standing against the wall and Ray is taking photographs in the mirror. Just like it was yesterday, like time has not passed, as though the ephemeral is now eternal whenever we catch a glimpse of these photographs that take us through the looking glass… Read more »